Waiting for G-dot

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to ask a nineteen-year-old Satmar girl, equally conversant in English and Yiddish, how she decides which language to use at any given moment.

“Yiddish just sounds better for some things,” she responded. “Like when you are yelling at your brothers to get out of bed, you could say ‘Get up!’ But in Yiddish, ‘Shtay-OOF!’ It just sounds more …”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew precisely what she meant. Full of lamenting diphthongs and expressive opportunities to spit on the listener, Yiddish is to dissatisfaction what Italian is to romance. For many people, the word “Yiddish” immediately evokes comedic cliches: Woody Allen as the lone Hasid at a dinner table full of Wasps, or Henny Youngman begging someone to please take his wife. But the language also has strains of tragedy—it is, after all, the true language of goles, or exile. Whereas Hebrew has a home to return to, Yiddish—a stew of German phrases, Slavic vocabulary, and Biblical parallelisms—was born out of exile itself. Its very essence is wandering and alienation. In his entertaining linguistic history “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods,” Michael Wex writes, “Rooted as it is in the long wait for a Messiah who’s in no hurry to get here, Yiddish sometimes approaches fulfillment but never quite achieves it; until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt, there isn’t much apart from pining and dissatisafaction.”

It’s fitting, then, that Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of alienation, “Waiting for Godot,” will be performed for the first time in Yiddish in a production of zeal and intelligence by the New Yiddish Rep and staged at the Castillo Theatre on West Forty-second Street. It opens on Friday and runs through October 13th. Vladimir—the more alert of the two tramps—is played by Shane Baker, a tall vaudevillian who also wrote the translation. Baker is an oddity even in the oddball-ridden world of Yiddish theatre: a goy from the Midwest who was raised Episcopalian. As a child, he first heard Yiddish from Groucho Marx, and when he moved to New York he befriended the accomplished Yiddish theatre actors Mina Bern and Luba Kadison, with whom he spent most of his time, speaking exclusively Yiddish and absorbing the language and the culture. Now, he’s such a luminary in the world of Yiddish that he is the executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture and reads yearly at the yahrzeit (death anniversary) of Sholem Aleichem. Onstage, he manages to be both burlesque and deadpan at once, the latter especially in comparison to his counterpart, David Mandelbaum, who plays Gogo.

Mandelbaum is a mess—a wonderful mess. He spends a lot of the play sputtering like a dying engine and whimpering as he struggles with his boot. These two sad sacks are the perfect pair, and their stage presence is bolstered by Avi Hoffman as a sadistic Pozzo, Rafael Goldwaser as the downtrodden Lucky, and Nicholas Jenkins, a nine-year-old from the Bronx with a toothpaste-commercial smile, as the Boy. Jenkins was taught his lines phonetically by the director, Moshe Yassur, whose mentor was Jean-Marie Serreau of the Théâtre de Babylone, where “Waiting for Godot” had its world première. Yassur was a child actor in Romania—when he was six years old, he survived a pogrom by playing dead—who later studied theatre in Paris and New York and has directed plays in six languages. The performance space at the Castillo is a black basement room, the costumes are bowler hats and smudges of dirt, and the stage directions are mostly to the letter, with perhaps a bit more gesticulating than in other productions. If the rehearsals I’ve seen are any indication, the performances are bound to be both hilarious and merciless. Essentially, it’s perfect Beckett.

Despite what seems to me an obvious appeal, however, it seems legitimate to wonder, why Yiddish? Why now? The directors and actors proposed that Yiddish lends the everyman tale a particular historical context that is otherwise forgotten or subsumed by the kerfuffle over the play’s existential meaning. Beckett completed the play, after all, in 1948, when people were still displaced all over a wounded Europe. The playwright himself had been greatly influenced by his time in the resistance, and he especially mourned the death of his dear friend, the poet Alfred Péron. Indeed, in an earlier draft, one of the tramps (which one isn’t clear) was called Levy, an unmistakably Jewish surname.

The play has long been a favorite of troupes working in unusual, besieged circumstances or with marginalized populations. Think of Susan Sontag directing her trios of Didis and Gogos in a candlelit theatre in Sarajevo, or the 1957 production staged at San Quentin prison, so rousing that it inspired a group of inmates to form a drama workshop that is still active today. More recently, the artist and provocateur Paul Chan directed “Godot” in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, an area decimated by Katrina, the play’s set the homes gutted by hurricane-force winds, its offstage the darkness of the neighborhood at night. I read the play for the first time at twenty while trying to recover from anorexia and depression in a particularly grim psychiatric facility. It is a work of art that speaks to the muddled and drifting in all of us, and, as Beckett would say, about this aspect of humanity there is nothing to be done.

But it is also—as Yassur sees it, at least—a story of optimism. “Man knows exactly what his end is,” he said, “and yet he wakes up every morning, goes to work, and does the same thing the two hobos do, Estragon and Vladimir. They know exactly their futility, and that there is no sense in waiting. The waiting is their task, and they are saying, all the time, ‘Are we bound to something?’ Yes: they are bound to the waiting.” I don’t know that I can read the play as enlivening, but I do find the enduring presence of Yiddish, a language that was so close to complete annihilation, to be a tale of triumph. The mere staging of this classic work of modern theatre into a language many still consider obsolete is proof that Yiddish is alive and viable. If you can watch the play as I do—that is, as a person who knows its passages as gospel—you can ignore completely the supertitles provided, and just listen to the phrases go on and on and on.

Kelsey Osgood is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her first book, "How to Disappear Completely," will be published by the Overlook Press in November.